IBM Said to Export Programer Jobs to Asia

[corporatewhore]

NEW YORK (Reuters) -Monday December 15, 12:27 am ET
International Business Machines Corp., the world's largest computer company, will move the work of as many of 4,730 U.S. software programers to India, China and elsewhere, the Wall Street Journal reported on Sunday.
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The unannounced plan, which the newspaper said it viewed in company documents, would replace thousands of workers at IBM facilities in Southbury, Connecticut, Poughkeepsie in New York, Raleigh, North Carolina, Dallas, Boulder in Colorado, and elsewhere in the United States.

The Wall Street Journal said that about 947 people will be notified during the first half of 2004 that their work will be moved overseas. It was not yet clear how many of the other 3,700 jobs identified as "potential to move offshore" in the IBM documents will move next year or later, the paper said.

Armonk, New York-based IBM, which has about 315,000 employees around the world, has been among companies that have moved traditionally higher paid services jobs to low cost centers such as India in recent years. The company has said it will continue to build its services business abroad, because it makes IBM more competitive, saves its customers money and frees up funds for other purposes.

IBM did not immediately return calls for comment on the report.

[POed_Ex_Repub]

1. I remember when software programming was a good job...

But not anymore, hard enough to get work with a few years of experience. I can't imagine what the recent grads are doing.

[kalian]

4. Would you like some fries with that....?

or maybe a cushy greeter job over at Walmart... :eyes:

[izzie]

2. Does any one under stand all this?

Look my great great great grand father made carriage items. There is a small town in Maine that works as a history village as it made carriages. We all retrained and learned to do other things, so this is what we need to do now. What will the jobs be if we do not make things any more and the service jobs are also leaving?And if we do not work who will buy the service and goods ?

[AndyTiedye]

3. The Only Jobs Left Will Be In the Army

That is PNAC's plan for us.

How big an army does it take to rule the world?

[kalian]

5. Essentially....you're not far from the truth....

The US is militarizing and with the upcoming draft MILLIONS of our
youth will be sucked into the system.
Then others, the ones that have better skills, will be sucked into
"support" roles. Unemployment figures will drop...that's for sure.
Its like Nazi Germany or Soviet Russia...everybody is geared towards
war or perpetual war... :eyes:

[ramapo]

7. BINGO!

I've been asking that question for quite some time.

I'm a former programmer. COBOL was my language. A true dinosaur. Got into the business in the early '80s. Thought it would always be a transferable skill. HA HA HA

Watched over the past 5-10 years the influx of H1B-visa holders. This COMPLETELY changed the IT world.

There are few Americans competing for IT jobs in the NYC area. I know. I see it everyday. That was bad. Now the work is going offshore faster than you can believe.

Project management is not a panacea.

[mrdmk]

6. We need experts on the experts

There was an article in the New York Times Sunday, December 7, 2003 called, “Who Wins and Who Loses as Jobs Move Overseas.” This interested me considering I am unemployed IT person with experience in the entertainment industry. There was something in the article that really pissed me off about labeling a job “low-skill.”

<snip>
The outsourcing of jobs to China and India is not new, but lately it has earned a chilling new adjective: professional. Advances in communications technology have enabled white-collar jobs to be shipped from the United States and Europe as never before, and the outcry form workers who once considered themselves invulnerable is creating a potent political force.
<snip>

and goes on about the participants, one particular M. Eric Johnson, director of Tuck’s Glassmeyer/McNamee Center for Digital Strategies at the Tuck School of Business, Dartmouth College

The one question and answer that really bothered me is the following:

<snip>
Q. If protectionisms the wrong answer, explain how the market, will solve this. Does government need to intervene at all?

Mr. Johnson. It’s all about innovation and productivity. As long as we maintain those two engines, we’ll continue to have a very high standard of living. Out in the Bay Area there are plenty of folks who would love to create a little bit of protectionism around their I.T. jobs, but we are far better off letting a lot of those jobs go. Low-skill jobs like coding are moving offshore and what’s let in their place are more advanced project management jobs.
<snip>

Did I not hear in the Nineteen-eighties, that employers wanted workers with more skills and that could do something step by step? In the late, Nineteen-seventies this county needed to change from a manufacturing to a service economy. This sounds like more of the same lip service. That the United States needs, “Advanced Project Managers” so we can tell the rest of the world what to do. This also sounds like more bad advice from the past.

The rest of the article is very interesting and should be read.

Here is the link for the New York Times article, but it cost money
http://query.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=F60F12F63E590C748CDDAB0994DB404482

Here is the link for the International Herald Tribune, it does not cost money
http://www.iht.com/cgi-bin/generic.cgi?template=articleprint.tmplh&ArticleId=120443

Unfortunately, the International Herald Tribune does not have the same edit as the New York Times does.

I am not a programmer but have done it and last thing I would say is coding is a low-skilled job. He is one thing I do know about programs is there are some that are not allowed off the continental United States for security reasons. Lotus 1-2-3 was not allowed out of the U.S. because of its double-digit accuracy. In addition, Lotus 1-2-3 was programmed from beginning to end in assembly language in the days of DOS, that is why it was so fast and did not crash!

A well-written program can make a break the function of a computer. Just ask someone whose computer crashes all of the time. We are not paying as much for the programs we purchase, but sure do a lot more now than they did in the past. Having this convince sent off shore is a bad idea in the long run.

P.S. IBM now owns Lotus 1-2-3 and has not kept up with Mircosoft Excel even though Excel is a memory hog (primary and secondary).

[ramapo]

8. A load of crap

Sure we need talented project managers. This is a COMPLETELY different skill than programmer. Remember you only need ONE good manager for a whole bunch of programmers.

Programming is not a menial task. In order to do it right, you should understand the application and the business/market that the application supports.

Coding is not a low-skill job. These jobs are sent offshore to save BIG bucks. I do not question the competence of Indian workers. They should be working on projects relevant to India, not the US.

[glasalle]

10. another link

Maybe this contains all of the original article?

http://www.umsl.edu/~sauter/offshore/07out.html

[mrdmk]

11. Seems to be all there

Nice find, thank you.

It is strange that the edits are different from one news source to another.

On the International Herald Tribune, story E. Johnson is suppose to have said the following:

Out in the San Francisco Bay Area, we see what look like high-paid, sophisticated IT jobs going offshore, but really they’re not that sophisticated. What is happening, for example, with Accenture, is that the role the consultant plays is changing. Low-skill jobs like coding are moving offshore ad what’s left in their place is the need for far more advanced project-management skills.


The two paragraphs are similar, but they are not. The same author writes the two stories and one wanders why. In truth, I need to compare the two stories line by line.

Back to the thread, there is a global shuffle going on here and the bar is raised here in the United States workers to keep up. On average people put in 50 or more hours per week into their job. For these people to go to school to improve themselves is asking a lot. There needs to be a viable plan for people and the oh mighty buck.

Note: Because people are working over 40 hours a week, Mr. George W. Bush wants to do away with overtime pay.

[bemildred]

9. Failed development projects are much cheaper if

you export the bad design and bad coding. Most of the present
crop of managers have no clue in any case, it is mere luck
when they get something that works, they cannot distinguish a
good engineer from a bad one. Successful projects are usually
a rehash of well understood problems using domain specific tools
and such.

For the rest, you might a well fail cheaply, it might buy enough
time for the boss to bail out rich.